The genome-wide association study
of the Alzheimer’s Disease Genetics Consortium

A collaborative effort

The Alzheimer's Disease Genetics Consortium (ADGC) Genome-wide Association Study (GWAS) was launched as a collaborative effort, leveraging the collective resources of the AD research community,
to identify Alzheimer’s disease genes. ADGC, led by Gerard Schellenberg at the University of
Pennsylvania, is a partnership involving:

NACC's role

NACC maintains a large database of standardized data — the Uniform Data Set (UDS) — collected by
the ADCs. NACC cleans and curates the data to ensure they are as complete as possible and makes
them available for research. For the GWAS project, NACC provides each ADC with a list of its own
subjects that are eligible for the GWAS, tracks which samples have been submitted for DNA banking,
and then notifies the ADGC and ADCs of the amount owed for the cost of sending the samples. (See reimbursement flow chart.) NCRAD sends DNA out for genotyping;
once the genotyping is complete, those data are sent to ADGC. Finally, NACC sends HIPAA research-limited
phenotypic data to ADGC, so that the phenotypic data can then be paired with the genotype
data. The GWAS collaborative effort diagram illustrates the data and sample submission process.